Compcache

From OLPC

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This command is run in the standard Linux environment via the Terminal Activity. The GUI will probably not integrate comfortably with the XO Laptop's Sugar environment. Your user experience may vary considerably depending on the established environment and the other programs running on the laptop, may need re-installation after an OS Update. See the Linux software category for other commands.

Contents

LINUX COMMAND

This project creates RAM based block device (named ramzswap) which acts as swap disk. Pages swapped to this disk are compressed and stored in memory itself.

Compressing pages and keeping them in RAM virtually increases its capacity. This allows more applications to fit in given amount of memory. This is especially useful for:

Embedded Devices: Memory is scarce and adding more memory increases device cost. Also, flash storage suffers from wear-leveling issues, so its useful if we can avoid using them as swap device.

Small Desktops (aka Virtual Machines!): De/Compression is much faster than swapping to disks (include seek times!). Of course, you also get to run VMs with much less RAM assigned. Total memory savings from individual VMs can be quite significant if multiple VMs are hosted.